Jessica Ruano ~ getting turned on by the arts

Posts Tagged ‘love’

This is a day to celebrate being alive. Kick your legs up and grass stain your knees. Roll down a hill into your lover’s arms and eat crab apples from trees made for picking.

Somewhere between the mall and the bus station, there is a patch of green, and this is where I sit. Flower baskets wrapped like birds’ nests around street lamps. People scattered like toadstools amidst planted trees. Phone conversations as common as shrill bird calls. Couples strolling along the pathway, hands held sealed with sunshine. Clear blue endless. You appear on your orange bicycle. Perfect.

Late night verses feel like early morning kisses. Sun shattered and vibrant. New places retain familiarity with photographs and messages a mere click away. As long as this feeling holds, I’ll imagine you in my arms every restless night.

Don’t take this the wrong way, but I kinda love you. And thanks to you, I’ve started thinking in poetry again.

—

This is where Virginia Woolf used to live, she said

Really?? I replied

And that’s where she used to write poetry, she said, pointing to the nearby park

For perhaps the first time in the history of my poetry, I’m writing about something topical. You might have heard about this volcanic ash that is sweeping Europe right now and forcing airlines to cancel all flights to the surrounding areas. It’s chaos. Don’t expect anything but the busy signal when you try calling Air Canada.

As many of you know, I was supposed to leave for the United Kingdom on Thursday afternoon. Obviously, my flight was canceled. I have been feeling very sorry for myself over the last few days because this trip was important to me, and now everything feels very uncertain. I’ve also been thinking about the hundreds of thousands of people who are stuck in one place or another, who are unable to see their loved ones and have no idea when things will clear up. It’s frustrating because there’s nothing that can be done; there’s no one to blame; and there’s no knowing what will happen next.

That same evening when I should have been on a plane flying across the Atlantic, my friend Paul accompanied me to a poetry show. (You know someone is a good friend when they will spend time with you even when you’re in a destructive mood.) I was so inspired by the evening’s performances — especially some new poems by the incredible Kevin Matthews — that I felt the need to dash home and write something positive, perhaps even uplifting.

The next afternoon, I received a call from CBC Radio 1, asking if I would come in to the studio and talk about my experience on All in a Day with Alan Neal. Guess they had been following my Twitter updates. I had about 15 minutes to get from the Glebe to the top on Bank Street — during rush hour. Amazingly, I made it. On air, Alan and I conversed for a couple of minutes, and then I performed the (rather personal) poem I had written the night before.